Sci fi one shot

[rob lefebvre]

Hey,

This is a one shot comic called 23rd Century dreamers. Rather than copy paste it all here I have added it to issuu.com and here is the link.

http://issuu.com/throwthediceproduct...s/23rddreamers

Enjoy!

[Fred Duran]

Hey Rob. I didn't read all of this, but what I did read I liked. A couple things:

First, it helps to post shorter snippets of script at a time, especially if you want people to respond more quickly (instead of waiting for five days, as is the case currently). Also, I had to mess with the reader on that site because the default reader setting was blurry and small. Maybe it's just my computer's screen not meshing well with the site's default settings, but regardless, it was an (albeit minor) annoyance that might preclude someone else from reading and commenting. Just a heads up.

As for the actual story, I saw that it was 34 pages and went into reading it planning on only reading the first four (because I had other stuff to do). I ended up actually reading the first 13, which is cool. I wanted to know more about the characters and the world you were showing me.

That said, in those thirteen pages, nothing really happened. You laid out groundwork for this world and for this boy who became a man who became a married man/history teacher/factory worker, but that's all it was -- groundwork. I've always been a bit more curious than I should be, so I kept reading past my original four page limit to see where it went, but after page 12 (and with several chapters of homework to read, myself), and with nothing really happening (in the sense of conflict or the "punchline" to all this setup, if that makes sense), I had to stop. 13 pages is roughly half of your script, devoted to setup or groundwork. If this is a one-shot, this puts a lot of pressure on you to really, REALLY deliver in the second half, pressure that could've been avoided if you "started the story" a little earlier. If this is an ongoing or a miniseries or a swatch from a graphic novel or the like, then you have a bit more wiggle room, but the fact remains that regardless of whether it's an ongoing or a one-shot or any of those other things, 13 pages of setup means you're going to be losing a lot of potential readers. They'll either end up reading the first couple pages and putting it back down, or they'll read the whole thing at the comic shop and leave without buying it.

Like I said, I ended up reading over three times as many pages as I had set out to do, which, regardless of the whole nothing happened bit, speaks to the quality of the scripting. Your panel descriptions were concise and gave the artist space to inject some of his own ideas (which has always been one of my favorite things about getting art back, personally), they were clearly single, static moments in time (as opposed to a whole bunch of actions at once), and it was enjoyable to read and easily to visualize. I'm sure that if I were to read the rest of the script I'd still have these things to say, but it comes back to the fact that just about half the script was spent on setup. In my opinion (and feel free to disagree), that's a little too much.

Overall I liked the technical aspects (the dialogue, the idea, the flow) and it's clear from these that you know what you're doing. Just make something happen.

-Fred

[Fred Duran]

And (d'oh) I now see that the title of this post is "Sci fi one shot" so yeah. Makes it doubly imperative to make something happen earlier. It's like you're promising a feast but you're having your guests fill up on bread and salad, but they can smell the salmon and lobster in the next room, y'know?

-Fred